Windows 10: Flash drive reads/writes at inconsistent speeds

I work on a lot of large .rtf files in Office. Sometimes when I click _Save_, the window freezes and gives me a loading wheel for 10 or 15 seconds before the document finally saved. Sometimes (less often) the file saves almost instantly. It's completely unaffected by how many changes I have made or even how large the document is--when the drive is in 'slow' mode, even a 50kb plain text file will take several seconds to save. It also isn't affected by any running processes that I can see--does the same thing in both Windows 10 and Windows 7 and regardless of what computer I use, etc. This read/write inconsistency also happens while copying/moving files to or from the drive. In 10 where the speed display is more accurate, it speeds up and slows down a lot. It goes as high as about 5mb/s at times, but averages at an absurdly slow speed (something like 1-200kb/s. Please don't tell me 'Flash drives are slow.' They're not that slow.) The speed seems to have no patterns based on the type or size of file currently being copied/moved. Does anybody have any idea why this could be?

:)

 

Slow HDD read and write speeds

Hi,

Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

We will require a few more information from you to help you further with the issue. Please reply with the following details:

• In which device are you facing this issue?
  
• Are you using an external HDD or internal HDD?
  
• Are you getting the read and write speed issue on any particular application?
  

However, you can Disk Defragment on your computer to optimize the drive. To run Disk Defragment please follow the steps from the article

Defragment your Windows 10 PC.

Alternatively, you can check for the read and write speed of the HDD in task manager. Please follow the steps mentioned below to check the read and write speed of the hard drive:

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc key together on the keyboard.
   
2. Click on Performance tab.
   
3. Click on Disk 0.
   
4. You will find the Read speed and
   Write speed at the bottom of the window.
   

Hope it helps.

Please reply with the status of the issue, we will be glad to help you further.

Nikhar Khare

Microsoft Community - Moderator

 

inconsistent performance on write/read to USB 3.0 flash drive on Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Same here! Very inconsistent performance copying to USB 3/3.1 flash drive. It's a Kingston device declared as USB3/3.1 compliant. Most of the time it heavily undeperforms. Sometimes it copies at speed above 100MB/s, but rarely, and even then, about 2/3 of
the file done the speed slows down to 10-15MB/s. The larger the file the slower it works. And the inconsistency is clearly due to Windows not working well, since the flash drive can copy at high speeds. Sometimes reconnecting it improves performance, but it's
a drag in itself having to pull it out and reinsert it and hope it works better.

What's up with that Microsoft?

 

How To Format A Write Protected Flash Memory ?

¿You already tried this one?...

Run CMD


1. diskpart
2. list disk

Then in the 3º step, put the correct number of disk in the list for the usb flash (if it's listed in disk 3, then you'll have to write select disk 3).

2. select disk #
3. clean
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. assign
9. exit

with that commands you will format the flash drive in fat32, if you have a large drive you can select also "format fs=ntfs" in step 7.

good luck!